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EUTHANASIA AND ASSISTED SUICIDE
PIETER ADMIRAAL
EDITORS’ SUMMARY
Pieter Admiraal, s also condemned suicide. Yet in some city-states of Ancient Greece, suicide was approved. Magistrates kept a supply of poison for anyone who wished to die. Perhaps it was against this widespread acceptance that the Hippocratic physicians took an oath to “give no deadly drug,” as they were part of a reform movement of physicians influenced by Pythagorean ethics.
The Stoics, another later branch of Ancient Greek and then Roman philosophy, accepted suicide as an option when life was no longer acceptable for any serious reason. To the Romans, suicide for halting life during painful terminal illness was acceptable. Due to the Stoic influence, the idea of dying well was a summum bonum, the highest good, and part of a noble life: “A good death gives honor to a whole life,” said Epictetus, a Roman Stoic thinker. In Rome, people were permitted, sometimes expected, to commit suicide to escape from disgrace at the hands of an enemy, or scandal (as it is in Japan even today), or as an alternative to public execution (as Field Marshall Rommel, a German hero, was given the option by the Nazis when it was learned he had plotted to kill Hitler).
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With the advent of Christianity in the Roman Empire, this viewpoint waned. Under the growing influence of this religion, and its acceptance as the official religion of Rome at the time of Constantine, suicide was no longer acceptable. The rule against killing had its origin in the Christian view of the Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” and the pacifism of Christ and the early Church. Life was seen as a gift from God over which persons had to take ordinary care. St Augustine, for example, argued that suicide was against the Sixth Commandment, against killing, and that life and suffering were divinely ordained for the individual. The moment of death was in God’s hands, an